A few days ago, I attended my first conference on Claudius Aelianus, organised by Arnauld Zucker and Marco Vespa from the University of Nice. As I just started the project, it was a timely occasion to meet scholars, who worked on Aelianus previously. The papers met all my expectations and I learned a lot about this author, the research questions linked to his works and the fascinating context, in which he lived and worked.

First Valentin Decloquement focused on the presence of Homer in Aelianus’ works and showed how Aelianus, like others – for instance Philostratus-, played with well-known Homeric questions. These authors could take position, more or less parodically, in some of the controversies, and they could even defend their own original answers in others if they liked to. Aelianus’ works allow therefore an interesting view on the reception of the reception of Homer’s poems and this aspect of their works can also be seen as an answer to previous Homeric scholarship, especially the one developed in connection with the library of Alexandria. In this respect, Valentin’s presentation allowed me to see some connections between my previous research on Demetrios of Scepsis and the new one on Aelianus.

Then, there was a whole cluster of interventions on Aelianus’ way of using the animal world to speak about human behaviours. Tim Whitmarsh emphasised the distance Aelianus maintains between the two realms, especially in similes. He compared Aelianus’ approach to the one hinted at in Ps-Lucians, Lucius or the Ass, probably a Greek precursor of Apuleius’ Golden Ass. In allowing a form of metamorphosis, the author of this text, blurs the boundaries between the human and animal world and can experiment about this other world and the lost of identity that this may bring, either on the level of human/animal or concerning, when seen from a different angle, an individual’s feelings of belonging to the Roman empire (or identity) or not. Emily Kneeborne developed this by comparing Aelianus’ use of the animal world with the one of Oppian. It has often been stated that Oppian’s and Aelianus’ works were close and that they shared common sources, but Emily’s presentation was enlightening as she showed in a well-documented analysis how differently the two authors worked and explored the animal examples to speak about human behaviours. This was then again expanded by Arnauld Zucker. He demonstrated how Aelianus keeps a difference between humans and animals despite the anthropomorphic vocabulary he often uses. The difference Aelinaus draws between the two worlds is much more subtle than acknowledged so far. It is based on a different definition of “animals”, which focuses more on the concept of “sophia” rather on the one of “logos” and this allows us to see how this author’s attitude to the notion of “nature” changed.

Finally, there was the presentation of Lucía Rodríguez-Noriega Guillén. She works on quotations, especially in Athenaeus and Aelianus, which made her contribution particularly relevant to my own project. She showed us, as did Emily, who individually Aelianus could use shared material. Her case study came from Athenaeus. It has often been stated that in some passages, Aelianus was very close to Athenaeus and that the Deipnosophistai could have been Aelianus’ sources. However, it was used, most of the time, as a critique blaming Aelianus for not having quoted Athenaeus faithfully. Lucia showed, on the contrary, how theses presumed irregularities were actually made on purpose by Aelianus. Changing the reused passages, by adding elements, by modifying attributions, or by merging ideas, allowed him to compose his own statements, despite the permanent references to previous authors and their achievements. She also presented her long-term research project on quotations in the imperial period. The intermediary results can be seen on the website of the project (inoriega.es ). It is already now an amazingly helpful tool for further research on quotations practices in antiquity! But the project should hopefully be developed in a second phase, where each of the 8’807 collected quotations will be analysed with regard to the purpose for which is what quoted, the relation to the original passage and the degree of literality!

Unfortunately the last speaker (Lionel Gourichon) could not attend the conference and his paper was read by Marco Vespa. It was, however, meant to open up the perspective and to deal with the animals mentioned in Aelianus’ work. The research focused on birds and compared the evidence archaeologists gathered about the presence and exploitation of birds in Antiquity and what Aelianus told us about them. Comparing the two approaches was very interesting, but also highlighted the fact that, when compared to other works on animals from Antiquity, the one from Aelianus remains a literary endeavour, showing the marks of his time. It was a work of compilation, which was not primarily based on observations. This is of course not a critique, but rather a reminder to see his work as a product of his time.

Finally I would like to thank the organisers for having made possible these enriching encounters!

It is a special year for studies on Ovid. 2ooo year ago the great poet vanished and scholars from all over the place take the opportunity to remember the author and his achievements. Here a list of those I already spotted, or attended:

Here is an interesting Call for papers from the University of Leipzig and the University of Potsdam.

Workshop Classical Philology goes digital Working on textual phenomena of ancient texts University of Potsdam, February 16-17, 2017

Digital technologies continue to change our daily lives, including the way scholars work. As a result, the Classics are currently also subject to constant change. Having established itself as an important field in the scientific landscape, Digital Humanities (DH) research provides a number of new possibilities to scholars who deal with analyses and interpretations of ancient works. Greek and Latin texts become digitally available and searchable (editing, encoding), they can be analyzed to find certain structures (text-mining), and they can also be provided with metadata (annotation, linking, textual alignment), e.g. according to traditional commentaries to explain terms, vocabulary or syntactic relationships (in particular tree-banking) for intra- and intertextual linking as well as for connections with research literature. Therefore, an important keyword in this is ‘networking,’ because there is so much potential for Classical Philology to collaborate with the Digital Humanities in creating useful tools for textual work, that a clear overview is difficult to obtain. Moreover, this scientific interest is by no means unilateral: Collaboration is very important for Digital Humanities as a way of (further) developing and testing digital methods.

This is exactly where the proposed workshop comes in: representing several academic disciplines and institutions, scholars will come together to talk about their projects. We have invited Digital Humanists to the discussion who have experience pertaining to special issues in Classical Philology and can present the methods and potentials of their research (including the AvH Chair of DH / Leipzig, the CCeH, the DAI and Dariah-DE). In order to enable intensive and efficient work involving the various ideas and projects, the workshop is aimed at philologists whose research interests focus on certain phenomena of ancient texts, e.g. similes or quotations, and who want to examine more closely how such phenomena are presented and used, including questions of intertextuality and text-reuse. The aim of extracting and annotating textual data as similes poses the same type of practical philological problems for Classicists. Therefore, the workshop provides insight in two main ways: First, in an introductory theoretical section, DH experts will present keynote lectures on specific topics such as encoding, annotating, linking and text-mining; second, the focus of the workshop will be to discuss project ideas with DH experts, to explore and explain possibilities for digital implementation, and ideally to offer a platform for potential cooperation. The focus is explicitly on working together to explore ideas and challenges, based also on concrete practical examples.
This main section will be divided into two sessions based on methods from the Digital Humanities; according to their main focus, projects will be assigned to one of the following groups: 1. producing digital data: computational analysis of ancient texts, detecting textual elements; and 2. commenting on texts: annotation and linking. It is entirely possible that some themes will be more or less important for the different research goals.

The keynotes and project presentations will be classified into the following sessions

I. DH keynote speaker : The workshop begins with keynotes held by invited DH specialists who have expertise in the special issues of Digital Classics. The aim of these lectures is to describe possibilities for implementing information technology for philological purposes, taking into account the specific challenges of ancient texts, their conditions and transmission. By demonstrating best-practice examples, the speakers will provide initial ideas as to what is useful and possible. This session serves as an introduction to the two following sessions that are focusedon the discussion of specific projects.

II. Project presentations
1) Producing digital data: computational analysis of ancient texts, detecting textual elements.
Projects within Session 1 will mainly deal with the question of how specific textual elements that have a more or less fixed structure in a text may be systematically detected: How might the conventional readings of texts and the manual search in various textual resources be combined with automated analyses? How might text-mining and natural language processing techniques be used to supplement a reading? The DH experts will provide insight into such topics as the possibilities of named entity recognition and collections of textual elements in semantically linked datasets that leverage formal ontologies. Networking with already existing resources for ancient texts as well as with similar current projects will be discussed. Questions relating to editing a text, especially to how a text can be presented and preserved for online research, may briefly be mentioned. However, the main focus here is on the extraction of information.
2) Commenting on texts: annotation and linking
Session 2 includes projects that focus on providing a text with metadata. How might the
different parts of a textual element, e.g. specific terms and the syntactic or semantic sentence structure, be explained by annotation? Which open standards for annotating a text may be wisely used? What kind of linking is possible, not only with the primary source text, but also with research literature and lexical entities, for instance? Participants will also talk about how the resulting resources could be used as real research tools for users, e.g. for a comprehensive search of particular terms.

The presentations will be given in German or English, as well as the discussions. Addressing this specific interest in textual philology, the searched projects should deal with certain types of textual elements that have a more or less fixed structure, e.g. figurative language, quotations or special terms. The purpose should be to analyze texts focusing on these forms and to annotate and align passages. The discussions, therefore, will address how to extract and annotate data, i.e. how to work with them in a digital environment.

The Classical Philology department at the University of Potsdam is very well equipped for this kind of joint project. The presentations should not exceed 15 minutes. As the focus of the workshop is on the following discussion, 30 minutes are scheduled for collaborative exchange after each lecture.
Contributions should be submitted by May 15th, 2016, in the form of a short abstract (max.
300 words) along with a brief biography. Digital Humanists are also invited to submit further proposals for lectures in the DH section, which should not exceed 30 minutes in length.

The workshop will take place at the University of Potsdam from February 16th to 17th, 2017.

I have been invited to Cyprus for an Erasmus teaching week! I am really looking forward to this visit and to meeting the students and members of staff. One of the highlights will certainly be the research seminars of the Department of Classics and Philosophy. Here the programme:

I had the opportunity to attend the last session of the Digital Classicist 2010 seminars. Linda Spinazzè, a young scholar from the University of Venice, presented a very interesting project, entitled Musisque Deoque. The project deals with Latin literature and proposes to provide digital editions of a set of ancient texts.
The choice of texts goes from the 3th century BCE up to the 7th century CE. For each of them a Latin text is provided where the editorial variants are highlighted and explained in a separated apparatus criticus. For each of the elements given, precise indications are made to offer the readers an easier understanding of the often difficult and varying abbreviations in an apparatus.
Further a research option for metrical criteria is provided, where the texts are listed under different meters and can be approached from this point of view.
In the paper however Linda Spinazzè announced another aspect of the project, manuscripts tracing on the net. She is currently developing a tool which would help to find the digital images of the variants listed in the apparatus of the text. The apparatus created by these means would therefore become extremely valuable as it would help to fill the previously inevitable gap between the manuscripts, disseminated in the libraries all over the world, accessible to few and showing each only one stage of the transmission, and the printed editions, a reproducible and easily available summary of all the manuscripts where one version is given as main text and the other variants are summed up in the appartus.
This project is therefore based on another approach than for instance the Homer Multitext Project. Whereas the project on the Homeric text starts from the manuscripts and finds new ways of presenting the complex state of preservation of the text, the Musisque deoque approach is starting from the currently available editions and tries to go back to the manuscripts, if they are available. The approach is less revolutionary than the one of the Homer Multitext Project, but it has the advantage to be applicable to a corpus of diversified texts, with different histories of transmission.

A few days ago I received the link to a database made by a good friend of mine. So I am really happy to mention it here, even if it is not closely linked to the present project.

However it shows the possibilities online presentations of ancients texts, with remarks on the text itself and comments on the content and, in this special case, of the general context of each papyrus.

In the last few weeks I composed a short note that I would like to submit to the PDQ (vol 1.2). It it not yet in the shape I wanted it to be and it should be seen as a kind of exercise for the author rather than a very innovative contribution. I still hope it is in accordance with the editors’ goal.